The Earliest Eyewitness Depictions of Khoikhoi: Andries Beeckman in Africa

Abstract

Countless studies by historians, art historians and anthropologists have dealt with the early modern image of the South African Khoikhoi. Lacking everything that Europeans valued, they fell prey to the most contemptuous imagery available. The term ‘Hottentots’, by which they were known, was considered more or less synonymous with monstrous appearance, beastly habits and cultural ignorance. As such they were portrayed in official reports and travel journals, in prints and drawings. Few European artists and travel writers published their observations with any recourse to reality, however. They usually created their images in Europe in accordance with prevailing artistic and literary conventions, time and again reverting to stereotypes that were embedded in prejudice and based on incomplete and distorted knowledge. Thus far scholars have not discovered a single drawing by an eyewitness from the first two centuries of Khoikhoi-European encounters. As a consequence our insight into the mechanisms of stereotyping is far from complete. We neither know how the images were perceived by European viewers nor do we know if and how the stereotypes blurred the perception and judgement of eyewitnesses themselves.